VDI direct and brokered connections and VHD strategies in Windows 7

Windows 7: Direct vs. brokered connection

In the context of VDI, connections can either be direct or brokered. Direct would be directly within a virtual machine, and brokered would be indirectly through the virtual machine.

Direct connection

The user launches the virtual machine from within the host system, logs on to the virtual machine, and starts the application within the virtual machine.

Brokered connection

The user launches the application directly from the host machine. Even though it's running within the virtual machine, this is transparent to the user. Windows XP Mode uses a brokered connection, and this can be used with other virtual machines.

Imagine a user needs to launch an instance of an older application named LegacyApp. She can launch this in a direct connection or a brokered connection. In both instances, the application would be installed on a virtual machine, but the difference is in how it's delivered to the user. Brokered connections are easier for end users.

Determining a VHD Strategy

A cool feature available with Windows 7 is the ability to boot to a virtual hard drive (VHD). The VHD format has been used with Virtual computer for many years, but the abilities have been expanded significantly. This can be done only with Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, but it can be a useful feature.

Dual-boot environments allow you to boot to different operating systems. One of the challenges with traditional dual-boot environments is that you needed to ensure each OS was installed on its own partition. If not, one operating system could corrupt the other OS. Now you can have multiple operating systems available on a single machine with a single partition. When you've finished with the operating system, simply delete the VHD file.

The process creates a VHD file (with an extension of .vhd) at the root of C:. You can name the file whatever you want. The size of the file should be at least 20 GB and is expressed in MB. You can make it larger to accommodate more data and files: 10 GB is 10240, so 20 GB would be 20480, 30 GB 30720, and so on. You can have the .vhd file either fixed or expandable.

A 20GB fixed size will always take up 20 GB of space, while a 20GB expandable file will start at less than 100 MB and expand as data is added to the file. The fixed size is quicker since it doesn't need to expand dynamically, while the expandable size consumes only the space needed.

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